Month: July 2014

Religious People R Us


by digby


Via Kos cartoons

That “keep your legs crossed” line was used over and over again and so reflexively and without prompting that it clearly revealed the antediluvian belief system that still exists among a great many people in our society. One might think that we have evolved past the sort of “good girl – bad girl” stereotypes and the prehistoric idea that women are a repository of evil intemperance — at least in the modern Western world — but we haven’t.  Not really.  For all the alleged acceptance of workplace equality, single motherhood, divorce and women’s open sexuality, lurking underneath the surface the old ancient attitudes are as strong as ever among a shockingly large number of people.

We may have come a long way, baby, but we’ve got a long way to go.

.

Speaking of wastes of taxpayer money…

by David Atkins

One might think that Republicans would object to spending millions of dollars on trumped up political carnivals, but no:

ouse Republicans are planning to spend as much as $3.3 million for this year’s operations of the special committee they created in May to investigate the September 2012 Benghazi attacks, a bigger budget than the House Veterans Affairs and Ethics committees were given this year.

According to a committee document provided by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s office, House Republicans want a $3.3 million budget for this year’s operations of the 12-member select committee on the Benghazi attacks. As with most congressional committees, the document indicates the majority party gets the bigger share of the resources for the panel; the budget provides just under $2.2 million for Republicans and just over $1 million for Democrats on the committee. There are seven GOP lawmakers and five Democrats serving on the committee, and it is expected to have a staff of 30.

By comparison, the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs — which has a roster of 25 lawmakers and about 27 staff members — spent $2.5 million in 2013 and has a $3 million budget for 2014. The Ethics Committee budget for 2014 was more than $3 million, with a staff of about 25 serving 10 lawmakers.

L’affaire Benghazi, of course, is about nothing more than trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming president. That’s all it is.

So of course Republicans are spending more money on the circus that is the Benghazi special committee than they do on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

These are not people who actually care about governance–or about saving taxpayer money.

.

That’s a lot of people

by digby

~20M people gained coverage under ACA. Here’s the breakdown via @nejm @commonwealthfnd http://t.co/He9DN9BDb1 pic.twitter.com/imcRexTBmi
— Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) July 7, 2014

Taking all existing coverage expansions together, we estimate that 20 million Americans have gained coverage as of May 1 under the ACA .

We do not know yet exactly how many of these people were previously uninsured, but it seems certain that many were. Recent national surveys seem to confirm this presumption. The CBO projects that the law will decrease the number of uninsured people by 12 million this year and by 26 million by 2017. Early polling data from Gallup, RAND, and the Urban Institute indicate that the number of uninsured people may have already declined by 5 million to 9 million and that the proportion of U.S. adults lacking insurance has fallen from 18% in the third quarter of 2013 to 13.4% in May 2014.

However, these surveys may underestimate total gains, since some were fielded before the late March enrollment surge and do not include children. With continuing enrollment through individual marketplaces, Medicaid, and SHOP, the numbers of Americans gaining insurance for the first time — or insurance that is better in quality or more affordable than their previous policy — will total in the many tens of millions.

As we look to the future of the coverage provisions of the ACA and their effect on the U.S. health care system, several observations seem justified.

First, as the number of individuals benefiting from the law grows, its wholesale repeal will grow less likely, although the law could still be importantly modified in the future.

Second, experience with the ACA will vary enormously among states. Those deciding not to expand Medicaid will benefit far less from the law, and since many of these states have high rates of uninsured residents and lower health status, the ACA may have the paradoxical effect of increasing disparities across regions, even as it reduces disparities between previously insured and uninsured Americans as a whole.

And then this:

Third, the sustainability of the coverage expansions will depend to a great extent on the ability to control the overall costs of care in the United States. Otherwise, premiums will become increasingly unaffordable for consumers, employers, and the federal government. Insurers who seek to control those costs through increasingly narrow provider networks across all U.S. insurance markets may ultimately leave Americans less satisfied with their health care. Developing and spreading innovative approaches to health care delivery that provide greater quality at lower cost is the next great challenge facing the nation.

Oh boy …

.

QOTD: Jill LePore

by digby

From a wonderful piece over the week-end over at Bill Moyers’ place called “July 4th Note to Tea Partiers: Your Politics Would Baffle the Founding Fathers”:

Precisely what the founders believed about God, Jesus, sin, the Bible, churches and hell is probably impossible to discover. They changed their minds and gave different accounts to different people: Franklin said one thing to his sister, Jane, and another thing to David Hume; Washington prayed with his troops, but, while he lay slowly dying, he declined to call for a preacher. This can make them look like hypocrites, but that’s unfair, as are a great many attacks on these men. They approached religion more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own, Washington proved diplomatic, Adams grumbled about it (he hated Christianity, he once said, but he couldn’t think of anything better, and he also regarded it as necessary), Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it, and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it. That they wanted to preserve religious liberty by separating church and state does not mean they were irreligious. They wanted to protect religion from the state, as much as the other way around.

Set loose in the culture, and tangled together with fanaticism, originalism looks like history, but it’s not; it’s historical fundamentalism, which is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution. Nevertheless, if the founders had followed their forefathers, they would have written a Constitution establishing Christianity as the national religion. Nearly every British North American colony was settled with an established religion; Connecticut’s 1639 charter explained that the whole purpose of government was “to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.” In the century and a half between the Connecticut charter and the 1787 meeting of the Constitutional Convention lies an entire revolution, not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution. Following the faith of their fathers is exactly what the framers did not do. At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when all but three states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one. Originalism in the courts is controversial, to say the least. Jurisprudence stands on precedent, on the stability of the laws, but originalism is hardly the only way to abide by the Constitution. Setting aside the question of whether it makes good law, it is, generally, lousy history. And it has long since reached well beyond the courts. 

I know the Tea Partiers won’t read it and if they do they won’t believe it. But you should. It’s great.

Yes, this really is what the Republican Party has become

by David Atkins

Hendrik Hertzberg took on the insanity that is the Texas Republican Party last week. Charles Pierce has some great commentary as well, as does Ed Kilgore. Just a reminder of what’s actually in the Texas GOP platform:

That the Texas Legislature should nullify—indeed, “ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify”—federal laws it doesn’t like. (Unmentioned is the fact that, beginning in 1809, the Supreme Court has steadfastedly rejected state nullification of federal laws.)

• That when it comes to “unelected bureaucrats”—i.e., pretty much the entire federal work force above the janitorial level—Congress should “defund and abolish these positions.”

• That the Seventeenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1913, be repealed, so that “the appointment of United States Senators” can again be made by state legislators, not by voters. (Admittedly, the Texas Legislature could hardly do worse.)

• That all federal “enforcement activities” within the borders of Texas—including, presumably, the activities of F.B.I. agents, Justice Department prosecutors, air marshals, immigration officers, agricultural inspectors, and tax auditors—“must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county.”

…

We urge that the Voter Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized.

Quoting straight from Hertzberg:

The pro-choice plank:

We strongly support a woman’s right to choose to devote her life to her family and children.
The on-the-one-hand plank:

We revere the sanctity of human life and therefore oppose genocide, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.
The on-the-other-hand plank:

Properly applied capital punishment is legitimate, is an effective deterrent, and should be swift and unencumbered.
Another on-the-one-hand plank:

We strongly oppose any constitutional convention to rewrite the United States Constitution.
Another on-the-other-hand plank:

We urge the Texas State Legislators to take the lead in calling for an Article V Amending Convention of States, for the specific purpose of reigning in the power of the federal government.
The Carole King-Aretha Franklin plank:

We support the definition of marriage as a God-ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a natural man and a natural woman.
And, for good measure:

We oppose the recognition of and granting of benefits to people who represent themselves as domestic partners without being legally married.
The Republicans of Texas are preoccupied with sex and its consequences, intended and unintended alike. Naturally, they devote hundreds of words to ideas for restricting access to abortion—pending the achievement of “our final goal of total constitutional rights for the unborn child”—and contraception. And their views regarding their gay fellow-citizens? Don’t ask:

Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nation’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle, in public policy, nor should family be redefined to include homosexual couples. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin.
Furthermore:

We recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle. No laws or executive orders shall be imposed to limit or restrict access to this type of therapy.

This is not an aberration. It’s what these people really believe, in the biggest and most powerful Republican state, the one that regularly contests with California to be the nation’s moral and political waypoint. It’s the biggest reason we can’t make forward progress as a country.

.

You know they’re lying when their lips move

by digby

In case you read the New York Times’ coverage of Barton Gellman’s Snowden story yesterday (instead of the story itself) and came away with the incorrect impression that there was nothing to see there, Emptywheel issues the necessary correction.

(PCLOB = Privacy and civil liberties oversight board)

A communication must be destroyed upon recognition if it’s a US person communication with no intelligence value — PCLOB restates the standard that NYT’s sources claim is used.

But after laying out that standard, PCLOB immediately says meeting that requirement “rarely happens.”

NYT’s sources say it routinely happens. PCLOB says it rarely happens at NSA, and not at all at CIA and FBI.

PCLOB, incidentally, recommends addressing this issue by having FISC review what tasking standards are actually used and then reviewing a subset of the data returned — precisely what the WaPo just did, though we have no way of knowing if WaPo had a representative sample.

But the story here should have been, “Administration’s rebuttal has already been refuted by PCLOB’s independent review.”

PCLOB and WaPo disagree about the tasking — PCLOB sides with past Administration witnesses on the assiduousness of NSA’s targeting.

But PCLOB entirely backs WaPo on how many worthless communications NSA is keeping and documenting.

It’s confusing, but worth trying to sort through particularly after the embarrassingly infantile caterwauling about “the greatest violation of privacy in history” from the NSA defenders yesterday. Snowden’s release of these intercepts (solely in order to prove such intercepts exist — a fact which the government has been consistently lying about to the public and to congress) to the Washington Post with strict instructions to seek government input was not irresponsible. Remember, if Snowden wanted to be a traitor or an anarchist he could have sold it to the highest bidder or just thrown it all up on the internet and let the chips fall where they may.

This idiotic Catch-22 isn’t even worth debating frankly. This is the Washington fucking Post we’re talking about. I swear, if these people had been around during Watergate they would be bitching about Woodward and Bernstein violating Grand Jury secrecy and agreeing with John Mitchell that “Katie Graham had her tit in wringer.” This is what newspapers do. Or what they are supposed to do anyway.

I’ll bet Dana Priest is glad she didn’t reveal the existence of those black prison sites during the Obama administration. She would have had it coming and going from all sides. That, after all, really did reveal secret military programs which embarrassed allies and forced the government to change course in the War on Terror. If these people had their way we’d undoubtedly still be operating them because nobody would know about it. Recall, this is what she revealed right in the middle of the Iraq war, just 3 and a half years after 9/11:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

[…]The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ “

.

Corporations have rights that prisoners don’t have

by digby

It would appear that’s how it stands today anyway:

“Hobby Lobby makes clear that all persons — human and corporate, citizen and foreigner, resident and alien — enjoy the special religious free exercise protections of” the federal Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, the law at the center of the Hobby Lobby case, the lawyers wrote.

The detainees want to perform additional prayers during the holy month of Ramadan, which began on June 28.

According to Al Jazeera, federal courts have previously ruled that Guantanamo detainees were not “persons within the scope of RFRA” and therefore did not have any guaranteed rights to religious exercise.

Of course, those prisoners aren’t persons with rights the same way that an abstract organizational construct like a corporation has.  Obviously.  Well, an American corporation anyway. (Whatever that is in this age of multi-nationals and global commerce.)

You have to admit that it’s fascinating how “rights” are being applied these days. That old coot Tom Jefferson called them inalienable and endowed by our creator, but apparently he forgot to mention that God was an American and He didn’t mean those rights to be conferred upon foreigners. He did, however, mean them to be conferred on corporations, apparently.

Speaking of corporate rights, perhaps it’s time to start dealing with this question. If they have the same rights as persons, why are they treated differently under the law:

Where does this corporations-are-people business start and stop? Under the law, corporations and humans have long had different standards of responsibility. If corporations are treated as people, so that they are free to spend money in election campaigns and to invoke their religious beliefs to deny a kind of health coverage to their workers, are they to be treated as people in other regards? Corporations are legal entities whose owners are not personally liable for the company’s debts, whereas actual people are liable for their own. Both people and corporations can discharge their debts through bankruptcy, but there are several kinds of bankruptcy, and the conditions placed on people are generally far more onerous than those placed on corporations. If corporations are people, why aren’t they subject to the same bankruptcy laws that people are? Why aren’t the owners liable for corporate debts as people are for their own?

If corporations are going to be given the freedoms that people enjoy, they should be subjected to people’s obligations and restrictions too. I’m not sure how many corporations would think that’s such a good deal.

The legal justification for corporate personhood seems to be that these entities are made up of individuals and that’s whose rights are being upheld. Setting aside the undemocratic nature of all that — employees’ individual rights seem to be exempted from this scheme — the fact is that corporations are not held to the same standards as individual human beings. In fact, there is a whole different legal structure in place to deal with them in ways that shield the individuals who run them from the laws that cover the rest of us. As it stands, corporations seem to be getting the benefits of individual rights that accrue to people as well as the benefits of corporate law that exempts the individuals who run them from the legal responsibilities everyone else has.

Meanwhile, actual human beings being held by the US Government are being denied the inalienable rights that are guaranteed under the constitution with some embarrassing legal flim-flam that says because they are called “detainees” instead of prisoners of war and are being held offshore in Guantanamo instead of on United States soil they aren’t entitled. And corporations are now said to have religious freedom under the first amendment. Why, if one didn’t know better one would think that old Bill of Rights isn’t taken all that seriously by some very important and powerful people in this country.

.

Ain’t history a bitch?

by digby

Krugman revisits the recent past. And it doesn’t look good for the usual suspects:

On the eve of the Great Recession, many conservative pundits and commentators — and quite a few economists — had a worldview that combined faith in free markets with disdain for government. Such people were briefly rocked back on their heels by the revelation that the “bubbleheads” who warned about housing were right, and the further revelation that unregulated financial markets are dangerously unstable. But they quickly rallied, declaring that the financial crisis was somehow the fault of liberals — and that the great danger now facing the economy came not from the crisis but from the efforts of policy makers to limit the damage.

Above all, there were many dire warnings about the evils of “printing money.” For example, in May 2009 an editorial in The Wall Street Journal warned that both interest rates and inflation were set to surge “now that Congress and the Federal Reserve have flooded the world with dollars.” In 2010 a virtual Who’s Who of conservative economists and pundits sent an open letter to Ben Bernanke warning that his policies risked “currency debasement and inflation.” Prominent politicians like Representative Paul Ryan joined the chorus.

Reality, however, declined to cooperate. Although the Fed continued on its expansionary course — its balance sheet has grown to more than $4 trillion, up fivefold since the start of the crisis — inflation stayed low. For the most part, the funds the Fed injected into the economy simply piled up either in bank reserves or in cash holdings by individuals — which was exactly what economists on the other side of the divide had predicted would happen.

Needless to say, it’s not the first time a politically appealing economic doctrine has been proved wrong by events. So those who got it wrong went back to the drawing board, right? Hahahahaha.

The problem is that instead of taking a look at their assumptions and trying to figure out where they went wrong, they just keep on assuming. After all, someday their prediction is bound to come true. Then they will insist they were right all along.
It’s a corollary to George W. Bush’s insistence that if peace ever comes to the middle east — even if it’s a hundred years from now — it will be proof that everything he did was right. (This is why he’s so serene these days, by the way …)

It’s all faith-based:

[I]t turns out that money is indeed a kind of theological issue. Many on the right are hostile to any kind of government activism, seeing it as the thin edge of the wedge — if you concede that the Fed can sometimes help the economy by creating “fiat money,” the next thing you know liberals will confiscate your wealth and give it to the 47 percent. Also, let’s not forget that quite a few influential conservatives, including Mr. Ryan, draw their inspiration from Ayn Rand novels in which the gold standard takes on essentially sacred status.

And if you look at the internal dynamics of the Republican Party, it’s obvious that the currency-debasement, return-to-gold faction has been gaining strength even as its predictions keep failing.

Sadly, when it comes to economics it’s faith in the turgid prose of a wild-eyed, Dexie-popping, chain smoking, half baked novelist whose philosophical world view was shaped by her sexual fantasies. And they call themselves conservative…

.

John Oliver speaks for me

by digby

I used to love them.  Now I don’t.  Mostly because it scares the animals.  But also because I’m just bored.  You’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

Still majorly in favor of barbeques, picnics, “This land is your land” baseball and blueberry pie, ok?

A double standard for climate versus economic reporting

by David Atkins

Kudos to the BBC for doing the right thing:

Good news for viewers of BBC News: you’ll no longer be subjected to the unhinged ravings of climate deniers and other members of the anti-science fringe. In a report published Thursday by the BBC Trust, the network’s journalists were criticized for devoting too much air time (as in, any air time) to unqualified people with “marginal views” about non-contentious issues in a misguided attempt to provide editorial balance.

“The Trust wishes to emphasize the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences,” the report reads. “Science coverage does not simply lie in reflecting a wide range of views but depends on the varying degree of prominence such views should be given.” So far, according to the Telegraph, about 200 staff members have attending seminars and workshops aimed at improving their coverage.

To illustrate the ridiculousness of having one fringe “expert” come in to undermine a scientific consensus, the report points to the network’s coverage of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in September released a report concluding, with 95 percent certainty, that man-man climate change is happening. As was their due diligence, BBC reporters called a dozen prominent U.K. scientists, trying to drum up an opposing viewpoint. When that didn’t happen — probably because 97 percent of scientists agree that man-made climate change is happening — they turned instead to retired Australian geologist Bob Carter, who has ties to the industry-affiliated Heartland Institute.

One of the hardest lessons journalism has had to learn over the last couple of decades is that sometimes truth doesn’t require balance.

But then, it’s not as if journalism doesn’t accept some things as truth. It has been difficult to find almost anyone in mainstream economic reporting who called into question the necessity of austerity to deal with “dangerous” deficits.

Isn’t it odd that journalism has taken so long to simply report established climate science consensus as fact rather than debate, while allowing little challenge to supply-side fairy economic orthdoxy? It’s almost as if the interests of the very wealthy were served by the double standard.

.